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Friday, December 30, 2016

On December 19, HonestReporting France published a critique of an appallingly biased and inaccurate episode of Enquête Exclusive broadcast on Channel M6 focusing on Jerusalem.

HR France’s response was published within hours of the broadcast, systematically taking apart the program’s skewed content. This post went viral on Facebook reaching over 70,000 people and garnering 3,000 reactions, comments and shares. A demonstration of some 200 people took place outside the Paris offices of the French TV station on the back of the HR France expose. Both Jews and non-Jews took part indicating support beyond just the Jewish community. HR France’s role received credit in the French edition of The Times of Israel.

Below is the translation of the HR France post that created such a groundswell.

The episode of the show Enquête Exclusive broadcast on M6 on December 18 about Jerusalem and presented by Bernard de la Villardiere is full of lies and inaccuracies (to see the documentary on the M6 site, click here).

Lies:

A historical lie:

The narrator presents the creation of the State of Israel as follows:

In 1947, to calm the tensions, the United Nations separated the region into two and Israel was born. Jordan is ceding one part of its territory, the West Bank, which is supposed to become the future Palestinian state. But in 1967, Israel waged war against its neighbors and annexed the West Bank, it was the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Given the number of blatant lies it is hard to know where to start:

1. The West Bank was part of the Mandate on Palestine entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference in 1922, with the aim of helping the Jews to “reconstitute their national home in that country.” The West Bank was therefore not ceded by the Kingdom of Jordan to create a Palestinian state.

2. Israel was not born in 1947, but on 14 May 1948, following the implementation of the Partition Plan of Palestine voted on 29 November 1947. Immediately after its creation, Israel was attacked by neighboring Arab countries, but won the War of Independence.

3. At the end of the war, the West Bank, which was to become part of the future Arab State created by the Partition Plan of Palestine, was annexed by the Kingdom of Jordan, which did not create a Palestinian state.

The deceitful use of maps:

The report presents, using a series of maps dating from 1967 to 2016, the “erosion” of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, after which the narrator concludes:

2015 saw an unprecedented rise in EU funding to FIDH – €21.2 million in grants according to the FTS. Some of this money was given to FIDH in partnership with other organizations, but neither the FTS nor FIDH provide information on how funds were distributed among co-recipients. As of December 2016, FIDH has not published its 2015 annual report.

According to additional data provided upon request of the European Parliament by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Budget1 FIDH is one of the top 15 EU recipients for 2015 and received €20.9 million from the EU. FIDH’s entire income in 2014 consisted of €6.9 million, one-third of this amount.

The grants listed on the FTS are as follows:

€15 million were granted to FIDH in partnership with ten other organizations for “The EU’s Human Rights Defenders Mechanism.” As stated on its website, this mechanism is run by a consortium of 12 NGOs, including FIDH. Its activities include “monitoring,” “promoting,” and grant-making throughout the world.

€4.3 million were granted solely to FIDH for “reinforcing the FIDH network for advancing protection of human rights as a development vector.” This grant alone, designated for overall activities, is almost twice the amount granted by the EU in 2014.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

France is third on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's 2016 top ten worst anti-semitic/anti-Israel incidents

Against a backdrop of devastating and murderous Islamist terrorist attacks, continued targeting of French Jewry, and reports of the refusal of some Muslim police officers to guard synagogues, the French government became the first member of the European Union to implement the requirement of labels on all Israeli goods produced beyond the Jewish state’s 1967 borders.

Labels such as “Product from the “Golan Heights” or “West Bank” must now must include from “Occupied Areas.” However, goods from those areas not produced by Israelis may continue to say “product of Palestine”.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry blasted the unfair double standard saying, “It is puzzling and disturbing that France adopts a double standard in relation to Israel, while ignoring 200 territorial con icts currently taking place around the world....”

- Is the $38Bn figure from the US alone? How does this figure compare to analogous aid to other states?

- yes the 38bn is the US military aid

Yigal Palmor Yes, from the US alone. And there's no need to compare, Israel does not get any aid, civilian or military, from any other country. The exception being Germany's subsidies for submarines built for the Israeli navy since the 90's: first two were provided free of charge, next 4 at a 30% discount financed by the German government. The subsidy is evaluated at €130 million per vessel.

'Satiriks' is the 'black humor' online platform of NRK, Norway's state broadcaster.

A recent 'Satiriks' clip featured Holocaust jokes.

Following complaints, NRK made an apology of sorts and removed the clip.

According to NRK, the clip was about students' financial troubles. They did not mean to minimize the genocide committed by the Nazis, and are sorry that the clip's message was obscured by the way it was done.

The Obama administration on Friday allowed the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements, defying pressure from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as well as Israel and several U.S. senators who urged Washington to use its veto.

The resolution was put forward at the 15-member council for a vote on Friday by New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal a day after Egypt withdrew it under pressure from Israel and the U.S. president-elect. Israel and Trump had called on the United States to veto the measure.

It was adopted with 14 votes in favor, to a round of applause. It is the first resolution the Security Council has adopted on Israel and the Palestinians in nearly eight years.

The European members of the UN Security Council are Spain and Ukraine, along with the permanent members - France, Russia and the UK.

The countries that voted for the resolution say that this has been their policy all along. Indeed, this is not new. Europe does not think Jews have any rights to Jerusalem or to Judaism's most holy sites.

A man in Llandrindod Wells, Wales, has been found guilty of assaulting Tesco staff and hurling a bottle at a police officer whilst shouting antisemitic abuse, but in an appallingly lenient sentence, he has been spared jail, despite being a repeat offender.

Philip Anthony Kuegler, 50, pleaded guilty to a charge of using religiously aggravated threatening words or behaviour to cause fear of violence and to assaulting a police office at Llandrindod Wells Magistrates’ Court. We are staggered however by his light sentence. Kuegler escaped with a six-month prison sentence suspended for two years, meaning that he walked free from court and will remain free so long as he does not reoffend and completes 20 rehabilitation activity days and five hate crime sessions, pays the police officer £300 in compensation and pays a £115 victim surcharge.

Prosecutor Stephen Davies said that Kuegler was the last customer at Llandrindod Wells Tesco just after midnight on 15th September, when he became abusive towards a member of staff. He was trying to purchase three bottles of cider at a self-service checkout but became angry when a member of staff informed him that the machine only operated using bank cards. Kuegler reportedly shouted at staff that everyone who works at Tesco is Jewish and squared up to the night manager, Mr Robinson, who told Kuegler he was Jewish himself and found his comments offensive. Mr Davies said that “The manager asked him to leave but he continued to shout and swear about Jews. He placed his forehead against Mr Robinson’s and [Mr Robinson] thought he was going to headbutt him. He pulled out one of the bottles and held it over Mr Robinson’s head.” Kuegler then smashed the bottle on the ground and walked away. According to statements given by staff to Dyfed-Powys Police, Kuegler was “extremely aggressive and abusive,” appeared drunk and made comments such as “they are all Jews”.

Monday, December 26, 2016

Flemish singer, comedian and Christian theologian Wannes Cappella told De Zondag on Christmas day that he was upset at the rate Israeli Jews were producing children ("joden in Israël"). He added that it was criminal.

Neither the journalist Paul Cobbaert who carried out the interview nor famous Belgian athlete Kim Gevaerts, who was interviewed together with Cappella, challenged him. The comment made Gevaerts laugh.

It is important, though, to see this U.S. abstention as more significant than merely Mr. Obama’s petulance. What it reveals clearly is the Obama Administration’s animus against the state of Israel itself. No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free, finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous President has done.

No effort to rescind the resolution, which calls the settlements a violation of “international law,” will succeed because of Russia’s and China’s vetoes.

Instead, the resolution will live on as Barack Obama’s cat’s paw, offering support in every European capital, international institution and U.S. university campus to bully Israel with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Roma are called "filthy cockroaches" and their "total extermination" is called for - the Roma are one of the most despised communities in Europe. The inscriptions about Jews are more varied: "Juden Kaput", "Juden Verboten", "Filthy Jews".

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Jewish representatives say an independent report published this week “trivialises anti-Semitism,” after it found that the National Union of Students was not institutionally racist.

The report into culture and practices at the national student body, which was commissioned by the union’s president Malia Bouattia and undertaken by the Runnymede Trust, recommended that the NUS improve its understanding of racism, noting several problem areas.

While broadly welcoming the report, however, the Union of Jewish Students took issue with some perceived omissions, as well as elements of the language used.

UJS Campaigns Director Josh Nagli said: “Jewish students are likely to be disappointed because… there seems to be a lack of any in-depth examination of the challenges facing Jewish students.”

The report’s authors note the “negative” media coverage of Bouattia’s ground-breaking election to president in April, which was “greeted with elation on the [NUS] conference floor” but which was met with headlines of “shock,” “controversy” and “anti-Semitism”.

Nagli objected to the description of headlines mentioning anti-Semitism as “negative,” saying this was “particularly concerning”.

He said: “By comparing the use of the word ‘anti-Semitism’ to words such as ‘shock’ and ‘controversy’ the report trivialises anti-Semitism. This only goes further to delegitimise the real experiences of Jewish students.”

If a Polish ultranationalist student intended to delegitimize his university’s main Hanukkah event, his plan seems to have backfired.

On Monday, on the Facebook invitation for a Hanukkah event at the University of Warsaw, Konrad Smuniewski inveighed against “Jew communists” and called Judaism a “criminal ideology” of “racism, xenophobia and hatred.”

His posts, however, generated a backlash that propelled the normally modest Hanukkah party at the university’s Judaic Department into the spotlight — garnering coverage in the Polish media that was highly critical of Smuniewski’s remarks and leading to a doubling in attendance at the event the following day.

“I cannot accept this sort of behavior, which I do not understand,” said Asia Bakon, 19, who is studying the history of arts and Hebrew, though she is not Jewish.

Bakon said she and approximately 40 other non-Jewish students came to the Hanukkah party for the first time this year “mainly out of solidarity over these hateful comments” by Smuniewski.

In a country where many left-wing liberals are accusing the rightist government of mainstreaming xenophobia since its rise to power last year, the anti-Semitic views expressed by Smuniewski — a devout Catholic and Donald Trump fan who studies history at the university — were particularly shocking to some of his critics because he couched them in pseudo-academic language.

“The phrase ‘Jew communists‘ is a scientific term. What’s offensive about it?” Smuniewski told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, which many consider Poland’s daily of record, in a 600-word article on the incident published Wednesday.

Radio Zet, Warsaw’s first private radio station — its share of the national listenership is approximately 16 percent — also reported on the controversy.

In a statement on its website, the university said that a disciplinary committee is reviewing Smuniewski’s remarks following complaints.

To Bakon, Smuniewski’s decision to publish hate speech under his own name, and to then defend it in the national media, is typical of what she described as how rising nationalism in Poland is emboldening racists.

“I’m afraid this is connected to how nationalism has grown in Poland over the past four, five years,” she told JTA. “I see it as connected to events in Poland and around the world.”

Friday, December 23, 2016

In the Netherlands, a three part TV program on anti-Semitism is being broadcast. It deals with, respectively, the Netherlands, the UK, and France. The Dutch Jewish Broadcasting organization (Joodse Omroep) charged Hanneke Groenteman, an experienced TV journalist, with conducting the interviews. She is a child Holocaust survivor. Her own statements about her ignorance of Dutch anti-Semitism as she discovers it in the documentary illustrate how much she has been in denial for many years about the anti-Semitism in the public domain and elsewhere in the Netherlands.

Groenteman is a member of the five-person Council of Recommendation of Another Jewish Voice (EAJG), a Jewish anti-Israel group. When established, one of its activists was the most extreme Dutch Jewish anti-Semite of the time, the late Hajo Meijer.The documentary’s title “The Canary in the Coalmine”[1] is catchy, but unfortunate. In the old days, coal miners took a canary down into the mine with them. When it stopped singing they knew that there was poisonous gas in the mine and that they had to escape. The bird thus had to die so that the miners could live. The badly-chosen metaphor is that the Dutch at-large can learn from the racist acts against the Jewish community. (...)

One Jewish interviewee in the documentary is Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, the Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazi communities outside the three major Dutch cities. He tells Groenteman about the many cameras surrounding his house in the town of Amersfoort. He also mentioned that a car once tried to run him over.

Another rabbi, Raf Evers, is leaving the Netherlands to become Chief Rabbi of Dusseldorf in Germany. He said that there were parts of Amsterdam he would never visit. Evers mentioned that even in the upscale neighborhood in which he lives, he sometimes hears shouts of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Furthermore, some religious Jews who are recognizable as such from their clothing say to the interviewer that they intend to leave the country.

David Beesemer, the former chairman of the Maccabi sport organization, said that polarization in the country is rising. He thinks it quite possible that in the future there could be a civil war in Europe. Another interviewee is Max van Weezel, a leftwing Jewish journalist who in 2006 coauthored a book about the Netherlands titled Land of Hatred and Envy.[3] He said that during the 2014 Gaza conflict he had considered leaving the Netherlands. (...)

Though not all anti-Semitism in the Netherlands comes from Muslims by far, theirs is the most virulent. The Jewish interviewees, however, do not emphasize this. Jewish silence about the hatred felt towards them by many Muslims has also recently been exposed by Meindert Fennema, a non-Jewish political scientist.[4]

Also some Dutch Muslims were interviewed. The most interesting is the young novelist Mano Bouzamour, who has a Dutch Moroccan background. He recounts that he and his brother listened to classical music at home. When it was too loud for his mother she said “stop the Jewish music.” He relates how after having a Jewish classmate for the first time, he rid himself gradually of the anti-Semitic prejudices from his home and environment. In the past he has mentioned that his critical observations in a novel on phenomena in the Muslim community have led to mass hysteria there.[5]

The other Muslims interviewed are street youth, for whom anti-Semitism and using the curse “cancer Jew” are common. The documentary shows also a brief scene of ISIS youth marching with flags of the terrorist organization in the summer of 2014 in a Hague Muslim neighborhood. They shout “death to the Jews.”

Some of Britain's leading universities are becoming no-go zones for Jewish students because anti-Semitism is so rife, the first ever higher education adjudicator has warned.

Baroness Ruth Deech, a cross-bench peer who formerly held the highest office dealing with student complaints, said that institutions may be failing to combat hatred against Jews as they “afraid of offending” their potential benefactors from Gulf states.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Baroness Deech said that the extreme levels of hostility towards Israel at universities across the country can at times go so far as to equate to anti-Semitism.

“Many universities are in receipt of or are chasing very large donations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and so on, and maybe they are frightened of offending them,” she said. “I don’t know why they aren’t doing anything about it, it really is a bad situation.”

Baroness Deech, a former senior proctor at Oxford University and Principal of St Anne's College, said that a handful of universities are now gaining reputations as institutions where Jews are unwelcome.

“Amongst Jewish students, there is gradually a feeling that there are certain universities that you should avoid,” Baroness Deech said. “Definitely SOAS, Manchester I think is now not so popular because of things have happened there, Southampton, Exeter and so on.” (...)

Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has been one of the largest source of donations from Islamic states and royal families to British universities, much of which is devoted to the study of Islam, the Middle East and Arabic literature.

In 2005, Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the late crown prince, gave £2m to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah – one of the most conservative emirates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – has given more than £8 million to Exeter Univeristy over two decades. Sheikh Sultan was described as "the university's single most important supporter" in its 2007 annual report.

Baroness Deech, who was the first ever independent adjudicator for higher education before retiring in 2008, said she was also dismayed by the inaction of Oxford University after complaints about anti-Semitism, despite the proctors being handed a dossier which detailed a catalogue of incidents where Jewish students were harassed.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Rome – “Priebke Vive” and a swastika were found on the walls of Testaccio a few hours after the death of Giulia Spizzichino, the 90-year-old Jewish woman from Rome who was able to bring to the extradition of the Nazi criminal, Erich Priebke, to Italy

Immediately after the announcement of her death, vandals painted on the walls of the historic neighborhood of city number 1 insults to the memory of the author of "Farfalla impazzita" which contains very important evidence against Priebke in Italy.

Anti-Zionism is “simply antisemitism minding its manners so it can sit in a seminar room,” a prominent British Conservative politician said on Friday.

In an op-ed published in the Times of London, Michael Gove — the MP for Surrey Heath and a former secretary of state for justice — wrote, “Antisemitism has moved from hatred of Jews on religious or racial grounds to hostility towards the proudest expression of Jewish identity we now have — the Jewish state.”

“No other democracy is on the receiving end of a campaign calling for its people to be shunned and their labour to be blacklisted,” he continued. “This is antisemitism, impure and simple. It is the latest recrudescence of the age-old demand that the Jew can only live on terms set by others. Once Jews had to live in the ghetto, now they cannot live in their historic home.”

Antisemitism, Gove emphasized, “deserves to be called out, confronted and opposed.”

Furthermore, Gove noted, “the fate of the Jewish people, and the survival of the Jewish state, are critical tests for all of us. The darkest forces of our time — Islamic State, the Iranian leaders masterminding mass murder in Aleppo — are united by one thing above all: their hatred of the Jewish people and their home. Faced with such implacable hatred, and knowing where it has always led, we should not allow antisemitism any space to advance, or incubate.”

Gove ended with a call for the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration — in which Britain announced its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — by moving its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

A Danish court has convicted an imam of violating Denmark's racism laws and given him a 14-day suspended jail sentence.
The City Court in Odense says Mohammed al-Khaled Samha held a speech in September 2004 in which he described Jews as "children of apes and pigs."

At the trial, Samha argued that his speech was protected, free speech. His lawyer compared it to the legality of posting cartoons of Mohammed that offend Muslims.
The court didn't buy it.

In the same video, Samha said "Palestine has been and will remain the land of Islam. It is the land of the great battle, in which the Muslims will fight the Jews, and the trees and the stones will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him’".

In the closing statement, the imam said that he belongs to the more moderate community of Muslims in Denmark, and said that he cherished democratic freedoms in the country.

In an effort to combat forays into the international public conscience suggesting that Dutch businessmen, civil servants and the public at large were ‘not nice at all’ – to put it mildly – during and after the Holocaust, this month the international media was presented with ‘new findings’ suggesting that Anne Frank was ‘not betrayed’ by an anonymous Dutch citizen, but that she and her fellow Jews-in-hiding had been stumbled upon by the SS.

The ‘new findings’ were presented by none other than the Anne Frank Foundation. The Foundation says it had stumbled upon this new perspective after rereading Anne Frank’s diary. On March 10, 1944 Anne wrote “we are out of food stamps” after two men in the same building were detained for illegally trading in food stamps. On March 22nd Anne wrote that the two men had been released. After rereading these entries the Anne Frank Foundation decided to “research documents from police and the justice ministry” in order to uncover how the SS had found the secret annex. Following lengthy research the Foundation came to the conclusion that: “Our research does not deny the possibility of betrayal, but it does demonstrate that other scenarios should also be considered.”

In October, the municipality of Amsterdam accidentally destroyed files relating to concentration camp survivors who had been fined for not paying property taxes while in Auschwitz. Recently, the autobiography of the Israeli-Dutch Holocaust survivor Carry Mass was published in the Netherlands. The revival of interest in the Dutch wartime past is of importance in the Netherlands because – with the exception of the country’s tiny Jewish community – only an extremely small percentage of the Netherlands’ law-abiding and conformist population has even an inkling of the extent of collaboration by Dutch authorities and the population at large during the Holocaust. Of course Dutch bureaucrats are even more concerned about the Netherlands’ image abroad, which is basically formed by respectable gobbledygook, such as the above gibberish from the Anne Frank Foundation.

One of the world’s leading historians on the Jewish communities in Arab countries is being prosecuted in France for alleged hate speech against Muslims.

The Morocco-born French-Jewish scholar Georges Bensoussan, 64, is due to appear next month before a Paris criminal court over a complaint filed against him for incitement to racial hatred by the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, the group recently announced on its website.

The complaint, which leading French scholars dismissed as attempt at “intimidation” in a statement Friday, was over remarks about anti-Semitism by Muslims that Bensoussan, author of a definitive 2012 work entitled “Jews in Arab Lands,” made last year during an interview aired by the France Culture radio station, the Collective said.

The Collective based its complaint on two remarks by Bensoussan.

“Today, we are witnessing a different people in the midst of the French nation, who are effecting a return on a certain number of democratic values to which we adhere,” read the first quote flagged.

The second quote cited read: “This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence.” Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole.

“Besides, with the animosity toward the French nation, there will be no integration as long as we will not be rid of this ancestral anti-Semitism that is kept secret (…) as an Algerian sociologist, Smain Laacher, very bravely said in a film that will be aired on France 3, ‘it’s disgraceful to keep in place this taboo, knowing that in Arab families in France and beyond everybody knows but will not say that anti-Semitism is transmitted with mother’s milk,” the quote continued.

At least 12 people have been murdered in three attacks by suspected jihadists from France on Jewish targets in that country and in Belgium since 2012.

The anti-Islamophobia collective called Bensoussan’s statements “dangerous and in line with far-right rhetoric” targeting Muslims.

But three prominent French writers and historians — Jacques Tarnero, Yves Ternon and Michel Zaoui – disputed the allegations, calling the complaint against Bensoussan “scandalous.”

The company operating Prague’s subway is investigating a complaint alleging one of its employees threatened to “cut off the head” of a Jewish passenger wearing a kippa.

The incident was reported last week by a member of Prague’s Bejt Simcha Reform Community, the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, Petr Papousek, told JTA on Tuesday.

The Prague Public Transit Company, he said, “is taking the complaint very seriously, and is investigating the details of the incident in order to draw conclusions on the behavior of the employee in question,” Papousek said. He did not identify the complainant, who requested anonymity.

A man wearing the transit company’s uniform earlier this month harassed the alleged victim in the presence of witnesses aboard the B line, which runs through the Czech capital and its Old Town, the Jewish news website ZTIS reported. According to the account, the uniformed man told the Jewish passenger: “When we meet next time, Jews, it’ll be to cut off your head.”File: Rabbis take part in self-defense training during the Conference of European Rabbis in Prague, Czech Republic, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015. (photo credit: AP/Petr David Josek)

File: Rabbis take part in self-defense training during the Conference of European Rabbis in Prague, Czech Republic, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015. (photo credit: AP/Petr David Josek)

None of the other passengers intervened, according to the report. The alleged victim took a picture of the man who he said threatened him. It shows a man with a shaved head facing away from the camera while putting on a black coat over the company’s blue uniform. He is wearing black boots.

Worshippers praying by the tomb of the founder of the Breslov Hasidic sect, Rebbe Nachman, say the rabbi’s resting place in the Ukrainian town of Uman was violated early Wednesday morning in a grotesque anti-Semitic attack.

Witnesses say a gang of Ukrainian vandals desecrated the tomb compound at approximately 2:00 a.m. local time, throwing a pig’s head and red paint into the building. Photograph close-ups of the pig’s head show a swastika was carved into the animal’s forehead. The attackers sprayed tear gas and shouted anti-Semitic epithets during the assault which left Jewish visitors to the tomb shaken.

“We were saved from murder only by the grace of heaven,” said of the witnesses.

“It was really frightening,” said a second witness, who works at the compound. “We’ve suffered from anti-Semitism here in the past, but this attack crossed a line and we’re all still in shock. We’ve started to clean the place, and the police have been called, but as far as I know, there haven’t been any arrests.”

Irish senators attacked Israel with accusations of apartheid during a parliamentary debate in late November about the closure of the bank account of a BDS group, prompting criticism on Friday from the Jewish state and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“What has happened with Bank of Ireland is very sinister. We have a foreign apartheid state interfering directly to pressurise a bank that was bailed out by our taxpayers to close an account to try to undermine this organization,” said Sen. Paul Gavan, from the Sinn Féin party.

Israel’s embassy told The Jerusalem Post on Friday: “Regarding the debate in the Irish Senate a few weeks ago in which only a very small number of senators participated, it was unfortunate to see such one-sided bias against Israel and a number of inaccurate accusations made about Israel.”

The members of the Irish upper house are not directly elected, and the legislative body has considerably less lawmaking power than the lower house, the Assembly.

The Senate debate was initiated by Sen. David Norris, an independent lawmaker, who said he was contacted by the Dublin-based Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign because the Bank of Ireland pulled the plug on the group’s accounts.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Meissen - an anonymous pamphlet with an antisemitic and xenophobic content is currently distributed in Meissen. The author or authors would like to enlighten the refugees about the real reasons they were persuaded to immigrate to Germany.

According to the authors the "Zionists from around the world use the refugees to complete the destruction of the German people." In the past "the Zionists initiated the Second World War and they want to become the "rulers" in Germany. In addition, these forces are responsible for the destruction of Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan and Syria. Only Russia can stop the Zionists.

Livorno – vandals painted Swastikas in the market area, one of them near a Jewish-owned shop. The swastika was accompanied by the letters "SS" and the number "88" indicating the letters "HH" which stand for "Heil Hitler".

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE in its Spanish acronym), Isaac Querub, has sent an open letter to the leader and deputy of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, in which he asks him to make clear his “current position” on the Holocaust.

The petition responds to an article written by Iglesias in February 2009 for the blog El Gesto de Antígona, titled The Reader and the Holocaust. A dialogue with my friend Norman Radcliffe, in which Iglesias writes that “the Holocaust was, fundamentally, an administrative decision, a mere bureaucratic problem” and that “there is not much difference between the police officers that efficiently arrest migrants in our global metropolis and the guards of the SS”.

According to Querub, “the Holocaust cannot be reduced to the action of civil servants devoid of morals due to the institutionalization of hatred for their neighbours built by Nazism”. “The Holocaust was a process perfectly planned by Nazi leaders in which the lack of conscience of the individual and their void morals played a central and decisive role in the achievement of the massive and industrial murder or six million Jews, specific programme known as Final Solution”, he adds.

It appears that a conference to be in Ireland, entitled “International Law & the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism” will, in all likelihood, advocate for the destruction of the Jewish State, as inferred by its title and description, which focuses on the wrongs of the establishment of Israel, rather than any purported “occupation” in the aftermath of the Six Day War.

To quote the ‘Organisers’ statement’:

“It is with excitement that we are announcing the launch of the conference “International Law & the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism” that will be held between the 31st of March and the 2nd of April 2017 at University College Cork, a constituent university of the National University of Ireland.

This conference will be the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine. It is unique because, while most attention today is directed at Israel’s actions in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the conference seeks to expand the debate surrounding the nature of the State of Israel and the legal and political reality within it.

The conference will raise questions that link the suffering in historic Palestine to the manner of Israel’s foundation and its nature. It aims to generate a debate on legitimacy, responsibility and exceptionalism under international law as provoked by the nature of the Israeli state. It will also examine how international law could be deployed, expanded, and even re-imagined, in order to achieve peace and reconciliation based on justice.”

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said YouTube videos and other online messages had revealed the scale of the problem.

(...)

Sir Bernard said he had been surprised by the abuse Jewish people had received while he was an officer in Merseyside before taking the top job at the Met, and social media was now allowing the problems of hate-fuelled abuse to be revealed to a wider audience.

“I was shocked at that stage that sort of thing was still happening. So I think it has always been there and what YouTube and social media is bringing to us is the reality of it for our minority communities.”

An investigation by Campaign Against Antisemitism into the activities of the “European Forum for Ethnic Minority Individuals, Communities and Organizations” (EFEMICO) has revealed that it is in fact a front organisation run by an antisemite.

EFEMICO is in fact a one man band run by Schumann. Draped in the flag and colours of the EU, its official-sounding website, efemico.eu, claims to represent all minority “migrant settlers to the EU” but explicitly excludes Jews.

But the man behind the website, Jason Schumann is an antisemite who recently told a Jewish Facebook user: “It is Jews who are the real nazis. [sic] No group of people more insidious, more evil, or more pernicious. An eternal curse upon them.” His personal Twitter account has been suspended.

EFEMICO came to our attention when it targeted three organisations, Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Community Security Trust and Jewish Human Rights Watch, accusing them all of harassing innocent individuals and menacing them with a Charity Commission investigation, repeatedly tweeting: “Whilst antisemitism is wrong, anyone harassed by @CST_UK, @antisemitism or @jhrwatch, please contact us to take further. @ChtyCommission”

. Whilst anti-Semitism is wrong, anyone harassed by @CST_UK, @antisemitism or @jhrwatch, please contact us to take further.@ChtyCommission

— efemico.eu (@efemico_online) November 23, 2016

Additionally, EFEMICO believes in the existence of a nefarious “Jewish lobby”. According to the International Definition of Antisemitism, “Making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective” is antisemitic.

(...)

Through EFEMICO, Schumann has tried to intimidate organisations which fight antisemitism by falsely suggesting that they engage in harassment of innocent individuals. This incident shows the sophisticated techniques now being used against Jews, even to intimidate them from taking action against antisemitism.

Now that they are aware of the situation, EURid, which granted Schumann his official-looking online presence, should cease to play a part in the EFEMICO charade. You may wish to contact EURid about this matter through their website.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

It is worth noting that the Bauhaus exhibition at the Musée des Arts décoratifs opened in October and that it took two months before the CRIF reacted.

Télérama writes: "In response to the protests against what Michel Weinfeld (the son of Jean Weinfeld, a Bauhausarchitect) describes as "rather heavy clumsiness," Olivier Gabet, director of the Museum of Decorative Arts, strongly denies "addressing this serious question lightly". In the days to come, he will add to the exhibition a text stating that "this map presents a selection of achievements by a number of former professors and students of the Bauhaus after their passage at the school. It mentions places and dates in the historiography of the Bauhaus and in the biographies of each of them. The legacy and critical fortune of the Bauhaus espouses the tragic history of the 20th century, and the personal trajectories of some of its former members do not always reflect the generous and progressive ideals of this pioneering school of modernity"."

French arts museumdefined the death camp Auschwitz as “an architectural achievement of the Bauhaus movement.”

The “Spirit of the Bauhaus,” which opened in October at the Museum of Decorative Arts, includes SS officer Fritz Ertl’s designs for the extermination camp among the major achievements of the modernist art movement and school active in the years preceding the rise of Nazism. Historians of the movement have debated whether the school, which was denounced as decadent by the Nazi regime, bears responsibility for disciples who went on to work for the Third Reich.

Francis Kalifat, the president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, wrote a letter of protest Friday to the museum director.

In his statement, which Kalifat also sent to Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay, who is Jewish, he wrote: “The Bauhaus movement has enough lovely projects that make it unnecessary to insult the memory” of approximately 1 million Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Bauhaus was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that gave its name to the utilitarian architectural style perfected by many of the school’s graduates.

Tel Aviv, where many German Jews immigrated in the 1920s and ’30s, is one of the world’s most Bauhaus-rich cities, with more than 4,000 buildings classified as belonging to that style.

After the Nazis shuttered the school in 1933, most of its artists and architects left the country. Some who remained worked for the Nazis with various degrees of enthusiasm, according to Nicholas Fox Weber, the author of a book on the subject.Ertl, who trained at Bauhaus from 1928 to 1931, became a member of the Waffen-SS in 1941 and contributed the plans of the barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Le Figaro. He and another architect, Walter Dejaco, were tried in Vienna in 1972 and acquitted on charges of abetting mass murder.

Lalin, who called the work, “the most serious study and the most important on this subject in three thousand years”, was sentenced for defamation and antisemitic insults as well as incitement to discrimination.

The Jewish cemetery in Hagen, in western Germany, was vandalized in
mid-November. Two tombstones were knocked over, and an attempt was made
to remove the lettering from another. The damage is estimated at 800
euro. Police are investigating.

The Charity Commission has published a report confirming that it will not punish Abdurraheem Green, the founder and Chairman of the Islamic Education and Research Academy over comments captured on video in which he demanded that a Jewish man be removed from his sight.

Green was recorded saying: “Why don’t you take the Yahoudi [Jew] over there, far away so his stench doesn’t disturb us?” The charity said that the comment was “aimed at a habitual heckler in Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner, in a highly charged forum of debate, who happened to be Jewish. It was not aimed at any community or meant to be antisemitic in any way. However, recognising that it could be misconstrued, he has apologised openly for such errors of judgement made more than 20 years ago.” The comment was referred to the Commission as part of a report by the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

The Commission wrote in its report that it will not act over the incident because it found Green’s comments to have been made in a “personal capacity and not on behalf of the charity or at an event it organised,” though it did concede that the comments exposed the charity to risks.

Even in a country where hate speech is the subject of intense political and judicial review, Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher’s Facebook post from February about the phenomenon was unprecedented.

Titled “Disrespectful Dog,” the 735-word essay by Asscher, a descendant of Holocaust survivors who last week became Dutch Labour’s candidate for prime minister, featured a compilation of racist insults used against him on social media. Asscher, 42, explained that anti-Semitic attacks over his Jewish roots were causing him to limit his use of Twitter and Facebook.

The text, a sarcastic open letter to online abusers, stood out in a country where the media typically keep out of the private lives of senior politicians — and where politicians, in turn, rarely speak of their ethnicity or religion. The post made the front pages of leading dailies and earned praise for Asscher. The top political commentator of the RTL television and radio broadcaster, Frits Wester, called the post “brave.” (...)

While Wilders’ prominence on Asscher’s to-do list is new, Asscher has consistently been quick to denounce other expressions of hate speech — including against Jews and Israel, Naftaniel said. He noted Asscher’s strongly worded reaction in 2014 to a remark by a Labour member and government-employed cybersecurity expert who said that the Islamic State terror group was a Zionist invention to malign Muslims.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” said Asscher, the senior-most politician to comment on the incident. To Naftaniel, this demonstrated a zero-tolerance attitude in Dutch Labour to left-wing anti-Semitism. And that, Naftaniel added, sets his party apart from its British counterpart under Jeremy Corbyn, who has expressed support for Hamas, Hezbollah and some attempts to boycott Israel.

“Corbyn is a radical,” Naftaniel said of the man whom many British Jews accuse of allowing anti-Israel rhetoric by some party members to morph into open anti-Semitism. “And while Asscher has his [own] values, he is a pragmatist.”

Asscher’s great-grandfather, Abraham, was a leader of the Jewish council set up by the Nazis to control Dutch Jews ahead of their extermination in death camps. He is not the first Labour leader with Jewish roots; former Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen led the party for two years until 2012.